TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
2014 (5) TMI 1162
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.... appointment of persons not having any education in law, though discharging the judicial function, which was impermissible and ex-facie violative of Article 14 and 21 of the Constitution. The Petitioner had even given suggestion to the effect that the appointments of these presiding officers be made in manner presiding officers of the labour courts are appointed. 2. The Writ Petition was contested by the Respondents on various grounds. In the first place, the very maintainability of the Writ Petition was assailed on the ground that the Petitioner had not approached the High Court with clean hands and had suppressed the fact that he was a chronic litigant whose various cases were pending before the Cooperative Court. Therefore, he had personal interest in the matter. As such, he was not competent to file the Writ Petition in the nature of PIL. On merits, it was submitted that such Registrar, Addl. Registrar etc. function under the supervision of M.P. State Cooperative Tribunal (in short 'the Tribunal'). The Chairman of the Tribunal is a judicial officer. Again, both these authorities function under the over all superintendence of the High Court under Article 227 of the Cons....
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....ated under this Sub-section unless the person whose appointment is proposed to be terminated is given reasonable opportunity of showing cause against such termination. 6. With this, now let us first deal with the argument pertaining to the validity of Section 3 of the Act. As is clear from the above, Section 3 deals with appointment of the Registrar of Co-operative Societies as well as Additional Registrar, Joint Registrar, Deputy Registrar, Assistant Registrar etc. As mentioned above, the plea of the Petitioner is that since Registrar and other officers are performing judicial function under the Act, any person to be appointed as Registrar, Joint Registrar etc. has to be necessarily a law person, namely, a person who has education in law and is well equipped to discharge such adjudicatory functions. 7. In order to appreciate this contention, we will have to look into the functioning of the Office of Registrar under the Act. It is elaborately explained in the impugned judgment of the High Court and no quarrel was made by the Petitioner in respect of that portion of the judgment explaining the scheme of the Act. Therefore, we can briefly restate the same. Registrar under the provi....
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....yment of a Society or the liquidation of the Society. 9. The question that falls for consideration is whether it becomes imperative to appoint a Registrar with legal and/or judicial backdrop keeping in view the aforesaid Scheme of the Act? In an endeavour to justify the appointment of a legal person to man this office, the Petitioner submitted that the very nature and significance of the functions discharged by the Registrar or his nominee, would manifest that knowledge of law and practice is dispensable to effectively carry out those functions inasmuch as such presiding officer is supposed to be conversant with the provisions of Code of Civil Procedure, Law of Evidence, Indian Penal Code, Code of Criminal Procedure, etc. It was further submitted that the functions are such that authority discharging such function is to be classified as "court" and it is so held by this Court in the case of Thakur Jugal Kishore v. Sitamarhi Central Co-operative Bank Ltd. AIR 1967 SC 1494. This decision is followed subsequently in Mukri Gopalan v. Cheppilat Puthanpurayil Aboobacker AIR 1995 SC 2272 and P. Sarathy v. State Bank of India AIR 2000 SC 2023. 10. The Petitioner also submitted that the B....
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.... some other authority. The Petitioner has pleaded for appointment of a person with legal background as Registrar etc. to enable him to decide the dispute between the parties more effectively, as according to him, any person with no legal/judicial background is incapable of deciding those cases. However, same arguments can be pressed by other side in a reverse situation. If a person with legal background is appointed to any of these posts, then his appointment can be challenged on the ground that such a person though would be fit to discharge the quasi judicial duties, but totally unfit to discharge other administrative duties which are the primary and day to day duties attached to the said office. 12. We would have still given some weightage to the argument of the Petitioner, had it been a case where order of the Registrar, deciding the dispute, was made final. That is not so. In fact, under Chapter X of the Act, M.P. State Cooperative Tribunal is constituted. This Tribunal consists of the Chairman and two other Members. In so far as Chairman is concerned, Section 77(3)(a) unambiguously provides that no person shall be qualified to be the Chairman of the Tribunal unless he had bee....
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....l background. No person is qualified to be the Chairman of the Tribunal unless he had been a Judge of a High Court or who held the office of the District Judge for not less than 5 years. Two Members of the tribunal are to be appointed as per the impugned provisions namely Section 77(3)(b) of the Act. Scheme shows that out of the two, one would be 'administrative member' and other may be a 'judicial member' though such nomenclature is not specifically assigned. However, it becomes clear from the provision which provides that one of the members would be the person not below the rank of Joint Registrar. It clearly shows that he would be a person who would have worked as Joint Registrar and in that capacity gained experience on administrative side about the functioning of the cooperative societies. In that capacity, he would have also gained some experience of deciding the disputes between the parties which could be assigned to him. Other member is to be non-official and he/she could be the person who is closely associated with the cooperative movement or an Advocate or a pleader with practical experience for a period of not less than 15 years. Therefore, other members ....
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....(6) of the Act as well. 16. Having regard to our aforesaid discussion, various arguments raised by the Petitioner based on the judgments cited by him are of no benefit as those judgments have no applicability. No doubt the Registrar exercising powers under Section 48 of the Bihar and Orissa Cooperative Societies Act is held to be a Court. It was so stated in the following manner: It will be noted from the above that the jurisdiction of the ordinary civil and revenue Courts of the land is ousted under Section 57 of the Act in case of disputes which fell under Section 48. A Registrar exercising powers under Section 48 must, therefore, be held to discharge the duties which would otherwise have fallen on the ordinary civil and revenue Courts of the land. The Registrar has not merely the trappings of a Court but in many respects he is given the same powers as are given to ordinary civil Courts of the land by the Code of Civil Procedure including the power to summon and examine witnesses on oath, the power to order inspection of documents, to hear the parties after framing issues, to review his own order and even exercise the inherent jurisdiction of Courts mentioned in Section 151 of....
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....ndent in their functioning. They are also expected to acquire necessary expertise to effectively deal with the disputes coming before them. They are supposed to be conscious of competing rights in order to decide the case justly and fairly and to pass the orders which are legally sustainable. In this behalf, we would like to refer to judgment dated 3.9.2013 passed in the Review Petition (C) No. 2309/2012 (Namit Sharma case). In that case, one unfortunate feature that was noted was that experience over the years has shown that the orders passed by Information Commissions have, at times, gone beyond the provisions of the Right to Information Act and that Information Commissions have not been able to harmonise the conflicting interests indicated in the preamble and other provisions of the Act. The reasons for this experience about the functioning of the Information Commissions could be either that the persons who do not answer the criteria mentioned in Sections 12(5) and 15(5) have been appointed as Chief Information Commissioner or that the persons appointed even when they answer the aforesaid criteria, they do not have the required mind to balance the interests indicated in the Act.....